I was always taught you need (usually) atleast 48 hours rest before working out the same major muscle group. Like if I do a whole bunch of push-ups on Monday (12 sets of 20 or so) the next day and even day after I’d be too sore to even attempt 1. So how do people do it? Does it not damage the already worked-out muscles?
In: Biology
More or less. The more you perform an activity, the more active motor neurons your brain recruits, which are what fire when you’re working out. Provided your nutrition is adequate, you’ll build back over what breaks down, with the added benefit of muscle memory that helps the movement feel more natural and automatic (provided you maintain good form and don’t injure yourself)
You also don’t push yourself to your max every single day when you’re training. So if your max is 100 push-ups, you do more like 60-80 most days. Then you slowly raise your max over time by doing that practice.
The idea that you need 48 hours rest between sessions of the same muscle group is a myth. This stems from the idea that you need to be fully recovered from session to session. The inverse is actually true for non beginners. To continually make gains you need to continually increase stress, more stress than you could obtain in a single session.
48 hours is just a somewhat arbitrary length of time where if you are new you will have recovered and if you are more advanced you will have recovered enough, although not fully. In reality though when programmed correctly you can use any frequency including 7 days/week.
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